


i made it in my mind

by postcardmystery



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Blood, F/M, Mental Health Issues, Mind Control, Psychological Trauma, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-01
Updated: 2012-11-01
Packaged: 2017-11-17 12:32:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/551612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postcardmystery/pseuds/postcardmystery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I love you,” he does not say to her, because she does not want him to, and she suffers for him and she bleeds for him and he does not question that he loves her, but he does begin to question what it means, for a man like him to love. </p><p>Fox Mulder, a character study.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i made it in my mind

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings for violence, suicide, blood, torture, mind control, and explicit and protracted exploration of Mulder's mental health issues.

He’s grateful for the insomnia. 

It’s a process, one he barely acknowledges but is too well-trained to ignore: that having a bed means sleeping in it, means sleeping, means dreaming, means seeing those white lights splashing across the back of his eyelids like acid. He knows that you don’t really feel in dreams, that it’s a trick, that his brain is lying to him, but he shuts his eyes and he calls her name and his skin burns, again and again and again. 

The years pass and the years pass, and Scully never stops sleeping. He’s not jealous because he doesn’t know how to be, because nothing in him will ever be calibrated to put _jealously_ and _Dana Scully_ in the same sentence, because even thinking about doing so makes his syntax snap and his head ache. She never stops sleeping, and he never starts, and suddenly Fox Mulder has two things to be grateful for; two things for which he never had to ask.

 

 

“You’re Spooky Mulder,” says the probationary agent that Mulder’s already worked out is going to be a problem, two weeks into academy training and everyone eyeing him from corners and whispering behind his back; and it’s years before he learns the calm smile that gives nothing away, so he grins, big and confrontational and scary, says, “Want to find out why?”

 

 

Later, he’ll laugh about it, but in the dark way you do when you know you’re never going to stop hurting. A man with the power of suggestion, and the most suggestible man in the FBI. He was always going to end up in that room with a gun pressed against his temple; he was always going to pull the trigger and he was always going to stretch it until it stung to try and save Scully’s life. He stays awake all night for about the thousandth time in his life, and he’s the only one who knows, in his heart of hearts, that the slim vein beneath his temple has felt the press of a gun barrel held by his own hand before.

The only difference was that this time, for the first time, he pulled the trigger.

Wait. _Two_ differences. This time, there weren’t any bullets in the gun.

 

 

His Oxford interview is in New York, his father smiling at his back, but it’s a smile laced with steel and Fox Mulder is seventeen years old, gangly and skinny and he hasn’t grown into his new body yet, much less his brain, but he’s already smart enough to know that in his father’s mind the worst mistake he could ever make is not to follow the path his father’s scored across oceans for him. 

(It was going to be Harvard, but doesn’t Oxford sound so much _better_?) 

The interview is easy and hard and exhilarating and horrifying all at once, his grandfather’s cufflinks laced through his shirt and every ounce of performance in his body practically dripping out of his pores and onto the floor. He makes the interviewer laugh, wit a weapon he’s just learning to wield, and asks a question about a new research technique that’s barely hit the peer-reviewed journals.

“What are your aims in life, son?” asks a man with a Harvard ring on his finger and the stench of money hanging around him in the air like smoke, and Mulder smiles, manages not to fidget, says, “I was considering applying to the FBI, sir. If they’ll take me.”

“From what I’ve seen,” said the man, who has, Mulder will remember, a very literal smell of smoke about him, too, “They’d be crazy not to.”

Mulder walks out into the grey edifice of Manhattan, snow in his hair and his hands shoved into the pockets of his coat, and the irony won’t hit him for a very, very long time.

 

 

Scully smiles like she’s let slip a secret that she wasn’t supposed to tell, and it becomes his life’s aim to draw them out of her, because a man can have more than one goal and to him they’re all interlinked, anyway.

He tells her he loves her and she laughs at him, doped up to the eyeballs with an IV in his arm and she thinks he won’t remember, but he does. It was a crazy thing to say, but someone had to say it and saying the crazy thing, he knows so very well, falls very firmly under his purview. She won’t say it because it’s crazy and because she still thinks, after all she’s seen, that if she doesn’t say something it will make it not be true. People call him the believer, but Scully treats language like a sympathetic magic and he uses it as ammunition, revels in ranting at the sky, knowing nobody’s listening, in saying the truth, revels more than anything in saying the truth that no one else will say.

So he says it, and she laughs, but he lives to make her laugh, so this one? This one’s a victory.

 

 

“You’re excellent at stakeouts,” says his academy trainer, his first boss, his second, his third, every partner he’s ever had and a couple of the ADAs he’s worked with, too. He could tell them the truth, that he hates to sleep and he always needs something to watch, that real life is better than television but that television is always better than his real life, that almost everything you could imagine is. That he only feels alive with his fingers on the wheel, a computer keyboard, a gun. That he remembers what feeling alive was like, he’s sure of it, but then he remembered something else entirely, and what’s prison, what’s fear, what’s the threat of the law with lies writ across the inside of your skull and scars beneath your skin that only you can see. That they’ll be watching him, one day, if they aren’t already. That he’s going to give them one hell of a chase once they do. That he’s ready for it. That he’s on that knife-edge he’s walked forever, the one that might mean that the prospect excites him. That he’s waited for that edge to tip since he first tasted Samantha’s name on his tongue for a second time. That this was how it was always going to go. That the truth of that does not make him feel anything, either.

“Thank you,” is all he learns to say, in time.

 

 

Oxford is three years of rain and snow and watching people’s faces to ensure he hasn’t made a mistake. He doesn’t sleep well, flashes of white in his dreams and a word in his mouth that he can’t quite drag out. He paces in his room all night and has to be ordered out of the Rad Cam at closing time and never quite seems to fit in. In his second year, his tutor sits him down and asks him if he’s getting enough sleep, and he says _no_ and it never goes anywhere. He dates a girl, and she burns him, but he doesn’t blame her, is smart enough to know that he was a step on her path and is grateful that he got to play his part. He doesn’t have many friends and he terrifies his research partners and when he gets his acceptance letter from the FBI the week before his last Hilary term is about to start, it definitely feels like something but even with his extensive vocabulary, he couldn’t tell you _what_.

 

 

It never changes, the _kaboom_ spark of adrenaline of mortal peril, of facing certain death and finding it not that certain. He’s been shot and he’s been stabbed and every time he almost dies he comes _justthisclose_ to getting it; he almost grabs back that vital thing they stole, him a scared kid and everything he ever knew turning on its head before his eyes. He bleeds out and his lips crack with frost and his chest is bruised and his bones broken and it’s always, always _almost_ , and it’s the harshest lesson Fox Mulder is ever going to learn, that there is no going back.

“So I guess I’m just crazy,” he mutters down the phone line, Scully on a diatribe about three am phone calls and boundaries and she stops dead, says, “No, you’re... I mean, you’re, you’re driven--”

“No, it’s okay,” he says, and it wasn’t until he said it, spoke the words like Scully’s rosebud lips around the _Our Father_ , not until he spoke the words aloud and made them holy, that he knew they were essential and inescapable and true.

 

 

He doesn’t want anyone to die, he’s never wanted anyone to die, but there’s death on the horizon and a date he’d tattoo on himself if it wasn’t already in every way that matters-- _21st December 2012_ , the day that the world will end. He says he’s not a violent man but he knows when he’s lying, knows that to be a profiler is to see the details but to never be able to ignore the pull of the bigger picture, and if people must die for this, for him, he’s going to make it mean something, he’s going to salt _their_ earth and make them pay. A better man would say that this isn’t about vengeance, but he’s not a better man and it does not how many times she says it, it does not make it so.

She almost dies and almost dies, and every single time he thinks the end of his world is about to shift in date, but it never does.

“I love you,” he does not say to her, because she does not want him to, and she suffers for him and she bleeds for him and he does not question that he loves her, but he does begin to question what it means, for a man like him to love. 

He never tells her, but only because he knows the things that hurt her, is so very tired of being one of them.

 

 

“They’re called the X Files,” says one of his academy tutors, and his tone is derisive and sharp, even a little guarded, because even the staff know about his nickname, now, know that he’s smart and he’s very, very weird, and it’s even rumoured that he fudged his psych test, that it should read _volatile and paranoid_ where it reads _sensible and well-adjusted_.

He has the advantage, knows that the rumours are true but that no one has any way of proving them, scrawls an ‘X’ on the back of his hand and he’s so, so close--

 

 

“I was under the impression that you were sent to spy on me,” he says, and waits, and waits, and six months later he’s still waiting, not sure what he’s waiting for, not sure why.

 

 

“You touch me again and you’d better _kill_ me,” he says, lips pulled back, his pinkie finger broken and his heart pounding in his chest, strapped to a table and neck-deep in a terror group the only person left he trusts thought he had sold his soul to for thirty pieces of silver and all the chaos his rage could buy. They kill the wrong people but playing this role was so, so easy, and he shuts his eyes and takes another breath and wonders if he’ll live through this, if he’s crazier than he thought he was, if it even matters at all.

 

 

“I want to believe,” he says, and the truth of it is: he never has to try that hard.


End file.
